Wednesday, January 1, 2014

commencing the year of the baby

Starting off 2014 with my first cup of hot coffee in a long time. Usually Matt makes one mug for himself and leaves about 1/4 a cup of cold stuff for me to drink with milk. But today I'm living a little!

2013 in review:A painful, miserable, spring semester at the Orthodox school where we were working. It sucked. Worst Lent of my life. We finally extricated ourselves in June. We hadn't wanted to quit, because we didn't know what to do in the fall, but a few big things changed and we jumped ship.

We went straight to a good month long vacation in Maine. The salt air in our wounds did us some good. Maine is a place to breathe and heal.

In August and September, we moved back to my hometown. The transition was very easy. We had already been commuting back for church, and settled right into more active participation there. We've grown closer with the other youngish adults in our parish and it's been great. We've fallen into more casual, intimate access to my family. Sibling returns are easier to enjoy.

I quickly got a job in an elementary school teaching 2nd and 3rd grade computer of all things. Matt pieced together tutoring, substitute teaching, and working at a farm stand until he got a job with the Post Office in October.

I got pregnant in September, thank God. All is well there.

Matt started applying to graduate programs in earnest. He's almost done.

I was thinking about New Year's resolutions, which I don't hate, and realized it's sort of hard to make certain kinds of resolutions when your next year is probably going to hold a lot of big changes. The future is always unpredictable, but this year we're definitely having a baby, and planning to move either to New Orleans, Milwaukee, D.C., Boston or Dallas, on rather short notice, rather soon after having the baby. So "I'm going to run every day" or "I resolve to move up a fluency level in French" might not work, because I have no idea if that's going to be possible. But "I'm going to save all the damn receipts and we're going to sit down and budget every pay period" is slightly more likely. And there's nothing to stop me from reading the prescribed readings from the lectionary every day in a real Bible and not on the computer. Ooh, guess I should go do that.

Those are my January 1 words on a page. My brain is stupid and I don't have anything more reflective to say. I think we'll get Chinese food tonight.